After Savannah and Lupe Arroyo had their second child, they looked for ways to grow wealth.
Three years later, they have multiple income streams, made a net income of more than $9,500 last month from real estate, and live in a larger, nearly $1 million home.
Back in 2020, Savannah was a full-time nurse in Los Angeles and after three months of maternity leave, she had to return to work because the family relied on her paycheck.
With a leadership role at her hospital, she returned amidst a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic and had to furlough nurses without pay, she told MarketWatch. She was also loaned to the intensive care unit without ICU experience.
Watching what felt like a crisis unfold in real time, she thought: “I need to find a different way to make money.”
Growing up, neither Savannah, 32, nor Lupe, 33, learned about investing. Savannah’s parents had lost their home in Sacramento in the 2008 housing crisis. Lupe, who worked at a benefits consultancy, is a son of migrant workers from Mexico. But the Arroyos were determined to earn more and figured out how through YouTube videos and podcasts.
“Real estate showed up again and again and again, and for obvious reasons,” she said. “It’s one of the best ways out there to grow wealth. I mean, there’s reasons millionaires own real estate.”
She said they took out a second mortgage on their Los Angeles house to make their first investments, two single-family homes in Atlanta, putting down a $40,000 down payment on each.
As they learned more about multifamily housing, including how it bounced back after the 2008 housing crash, that became the backbone of their strategy.
“We knew that this was our key to financial freedom and for us it was like, okay, we don’t have any money to start,” she said.
They learned about syndications, where they could pool other investors’ money to buy properties they couldn’t afford alone. Their first multifamily deal was a $1 million apartment complex in northwestern Oregon they closed on in November 2020. While they pitched the idea to friends and family members and got only a handful of replies, Savannah said they were able to raise $250,000 and pulled another $100,000 from their own retirement accounts to secure the deal.
“As I started doing it with our network of family and friends, I realized healthcare professionals would benefit immensely from this,” she said.
She started Networth Nurse to fill a need she saw for financial education in healthcare. Her business partner Ky Arnold, a fellow healthcare worker, and her sister are part owners. And through their Willow Investment Group, Savannah and Lupe have now invested in five syndication deals (a 12-unit, an 18-unit, a 24-unit and a 36-unit apartment complex in Oregon, plus a storage facility in Arizona). Two-thirds of their investors work in healthcare, according to a list she provided.
The group typically makes repairs and raises rents. They’ve dealt with challenges like inheriting a tenant who hadn’t paid for six months and whose unit was severely damaged. Ultimately, they pursued an eviction, rehabbed the space and raised the rent by $260 per month.
As the family started to earn more passive income, Savannah switched to part-time work for the same hospital system. She and Lupe pay dividends quarterly to themselves and their investors, and she said they have met their targets.
Last year, Savannah found herself wanting a bigger house outside Los Angeles, but they couldn’t get a loan because their income was not enough to balance out the mortgage debt they held. (They didn’t have enough income from their primary jobs, and their businesses were not yet two years old.)
“We got super strategic and leveraged real estate again,” she said, “and ended up ‘house hacking’ our way into my ideal house in an ideal neighborhood.”
She said they spent $7,500 to get their 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom L.A. house ready for “mid-term” renters, with fresh paint, new carpets, locks for each bedroom and keyless entry. Now they rent their former home for 30 days or more to traveling contractors, including travel nurses. They started in February, and in April, earned nearly $4,000 in net rent. They project about $3,000 a month on average moving forward.
It’s almost enough to cover the rent on the new home they share with their daughters, who are now 5 and 3. The Northern California house has 4 bedrooms and is 700 square feet larger, located near hiking trails and valued at close to $1 million. The Arroyos earn enough from real estate that Lupe recently left his full-time job at the benefits consultancy to work for the family businesses, including a new startup with Arnold called InvestHealth that’s a financial wellness B2B platform for healthcare professionals.
How does Savannah feel about real estate, three years later?
“Still obsessed,” she said. “It’s changed my life so much, and I’m still so passionate about sharing it with healthcare professionals.”
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